When I was a kid, my next door neighbor was an ultra-marathoner and the fittest person I'd ever met. He died suddenly one day of a heart attack while out on a run.
When this happens it's typically due to undiagnosed cardiomyopathy (which is very difficult to detect). It's true that when something like that happens to someone they would've lived longer had they not been an endurance athlete, but most endurance athletes live about as long as their less-active peers. I get a yearly physical just to be safe, but honestly running is my favorite way to decompress and I'd need some ki…
HOCMs are usually detectable with echocardiograms.
"What we list for legal purposes" and "what the device actually does" might not be the same thing. I imagine saying "my device detects heart attacks" gets the FDA involved and makes everything ten times more expensive...
Differentiating between cardiac arrest and taking the watch off your wrist may be interesting. And I kinda wonder how good any single-lead EKG would be at detecting a heart attack when your heart is still beating. Even the expensive multi-lead machines usually auto-diagnose me with an old infarction, which is false.
Apart from the immediate “flatline” the watch also detects that it is not proximate to the skin. As soon as you take it off the watch disables things like ApplePay. It knows when it being/has been taken off.
I’d think the decision should be up to the owner of the device. Who is the company to determine acceptable functionality AFTER purchase?
Who is in a better position to know if such a feature doesn't work?
It’s not really related to determination of use value or other qualitative questions. If my blender, or even my blood pressure machines, gets recalled, the company doesn’t break into my house to cut the wires for my safety. How is this not a basic violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act?
I can’t find the source now but I remember hearing about a study into the efficacy of prayer. Briefly, the study recruited several Christians to pray for patients in a hospital. The patients were split into three groups: a control group who weren’t prayed for, a group who were prayed for but who weren’t told, and a group who were prayed for and were informed that they were being prayed for. Allegedly the patients in…
Years ago, I joined a health list for parents of children with a very serious medical condition. When I joined, the discussion involved a lot of "Our child is facing X surgery. Please pray for us." The longer I was there, the more the discussion became "Our child is facing X surgery. Have you or your child had this surgery? Pros? Cons? Any good tips?" Prayer very often means "It's hopeless. Humans can't fix this. Our…
Prayer is a human act of connection that has been going on longer than recorded history. Evolutionarily, if most people felt it was hopelessness, it wouldn’t have lasted so long.
Modern feelings of hopelessness and nihilism extremely common in the western world, many people are dealing with these feelings through medication. The effectiveness of regular prayer on mental health is surprising according to studies and demographic data.
I agree that in this particular use case it was beneficial to wear an Apple Watch. But never ever wear a watch on your motorcycle. The force and impact can mess up your wrist in a crash. If you land on the watch it can push the case into your wrist potentially breaking it. Or hook behind something. If you do insist on a watch, wear a motorcycle jacket and long gloves over it.
Is this based on real accident statistics? If you ride motorcycle without gloves and jacket and crash you will have much more severe injuries to care about much more certainly. So I would doubt wearing a watch is a significant risk factor.
Answer: it is not based on real statistics nor experience
How far do you go with that? Have you examined your CPU with an electron microscope? What about the motherboard? Every peripheral? Where does it end? At some point you have to trust someone.
If you don't wear a smartwatch while out and about, how is your desktop CPU at home going to upload your heard rate or location to the cloud?
A friend of mine runs a charity [1] that deals with providing AED (Automated External Defibrillator) devices to organisations. These things save lives. They can deliver shocks to the heart if necessary and can guide laypeople through giving CPR until help arrives (I think many models now actually tell you if you aren't giving strong enough compressions, for example). I would also highly recommend people go through th…
i see those AEDs popping up around, ie in the office, train station, every pharmacy around has them. My wife is an emergency doctor, an she has clear opinion about those - yes they save lives, but in most cases, people will end up as 'vegetables' (not sure what's the proper english term for +-brain death). I only presume she meant more severe heart attacks that would normally result in death prior to emergency arrivi…
Just like with old school CPR, there's really no guarantee you won't be a vegetable. Maybe you get lucky and the person doing CPR does it right, the AED arrives soon enough, and the paramedics arrive soon enough. Always make sure you have a living will to cover such kinds of situations. I would hate having my vegetable body ending up in a fight between loved ones who want to keep me alive and loved ones who want to do the humane thing.
I bet this is a great feature (and I do have an Apple Watch), but can we please hold for a sec here? This piece reads like an Ad. Furthermore, many comments here are about "I want to see my kids grow up". Now please, calculate the odds of: - you are in a terrible accident - there is no one around you to call an ambulance - you can’t call an ambulance yourself, because you are knocked out or can’t move I think the odd…
> unless you ride around alone in remote areas
In which case you will probably not have a cellphone connection anyway.